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Archive for August, 2008

A website banner and the Moonphase unsourced rumors blog say that SHAFT/Akiyuki Shinbo’s newest upcoming anime is a Nisio Oishin novel named Bakemonogatari. I read Zaregoto pretty recently and was only a little impressed, mainly because it had the exact same writing gimmick as every other Japanese book I’ve ever read, so it’s just as well this is just going to be more otaku jokes. I think SZS is their only other recent series not based on a bad manga, so it might be interesting, I guess? This genre is getting really overcrowded now, though, they should animate something else from Kodansha Box. Like Megatokyo.

I’d spend more of this entry talking about the newly-available doujins by Yoshitoshi ABe now on the iTunes store for the low price of $5 or something, but that’s been around forever, and I have a feeling that anyone who bothers to read this would also have the time to read ANN and their article on this so I’ll just say that you should really go ahead and buy it if you’ve already gone and dropped hundreds on Apple hardware. The translation isn’t really top-notch but that’s the price you pay for getting the doujin 90% cheaper than second-hand price, I guess.

The second piece of news seems a little more fresh: After opening up my goodies acquired from today’s trip to Akiba, I was unexpectedly greeted by a full English translation of the manga portion of Strike Witches: The Witch of Africa/Witch in Africa(Japanese article here). If you’re too lazy to click those links, this has some fairly big names working on it, like the Godfather of Mechamusume himself, Shimada Humikane, Takeshi Nogami, and apparent military nut Suzuki Takaaki, and it’s all translated by Dan Kanemitsu, a REAL TRANSLATOR! Unfortunately, some lines are botched in a way that make me think that a Japanese guy went back over the thing and threw some crap in there (“Gentlemen! What are doing?!”), but it’s still worth the 1200 yen, and Toranoana still seemed to have big stacks of em’ if you want to pay up (which you should do if you love girls with no pants!!)

After 5 hours in the brain-melting heat, I was forced to retreat from Ariake, a defeated man. A combination of long hair and my body’s extraordinary ability to retain heat caused, as happens so often in this country, my mind to say “yes” while my body screamed “no”, and before I knew it (somewhat literally, I think I had multiple OBEs in line for one thing or another) I was on the monorail back to air conditioning and a futon to pass out on. Since I’ll I’d probably manage to get today is ABe’s stuff and a handful of maniac doujins that would get me arrested in at least eight states, I think I’ll hold off until fuyukomi where I will likely be far more successful.

Quick notes before I go lie down and try to tie my hamstrings back together:

*Wonder Festival ruins everything – 75% of the escalators were out of comission, including the ones connecting the upper and lower levels of the east halls, and quite obviously the 1f-4f escalator in the west hall (the one that broke), which all had these 8 foot tall barriers blocking them off, lest someone breaks their leg on an immobile escalator. Thankfully some of the west hall escalators actually worked (main hall to 1f, 4f to main hall) but there were lots of guards yelling at you to leave space between you and the person in front of you. All in all, even worse crowds, and it’s only day one.

*Industry area smells like week-old gym socks, and it’s only day one.

*Japanese women are, in fact, capable of sweating.

*Don’t take friends that are violently allergic to pork to Chinese restaurants, no matter how hungry you may be.

*For some reason, the only way in and out of the East halls were the East-2 door and the East-5 door. I forget, is this normal?

*Maritan’s tagline this time around is very apt: 「この温気、ニオイ。。。ベトナムを思い出すぞ！」 or roughly “This heat, this smell… brings me back to ‘Nam!”

Taking it relatively easy tomorrow – doing the first monorail over from Shimbashi tomorrow, lining up for east hall all because of Ueda Hajime and then running over to west to try to grab things before everything half-decent sells out, hopefully everyone will be in Zun’s line instead of buying things that you can’t buy at every store ever

Today I exchanged a few hundred calories, a couple thousand yen, and my childish naivete regarding what the words “hot” and “uncomfortable” mean for a small number of Rozen Maiden coterie magazines of fairly high quality.

I have returned from my travails a changed man, one who now understands the cruelty and oppression that late capitalism inflicts upon the bourgeoise.

Returning to the fray tomorrow, don’t know if I will return unscathed. Tell my family (and Souseiseki) I love them.

I caught something at Otakon and I’m still feeling kinda bad, but I’ll try to get enough power to write it up by listening to No Border on repeat (although kransom and others pretty much got all you’d care about). Meanwhile, here’s some stuff I meant to post about ages ago.

Man, don’t TYPE-MOON adaptations suck? Kara no Kyoukai is some good stuff, but everything I’ve seen out of Tsukihime and Fate/stay night has been completely forgettable at best. It’s usually because of their apparently editorless writer Nasu Kinoko’s scripts, which are thousands and thousands of pages, an endless sea of complete bullshit (but we love him anyway). Throwing enough words away to get a decent pacing is tough, and this manga definitely didn’t try hard enough – Melty Blood is supposed to be a fighting game, and I only count about four short hand-to-hand fighting scenes in the first two volumes. But that’s probably not the point anyway. This manga isn’t about fighting, it’s about tsundere fanservice. Pretty much every scene so far contains a girl trying to lecture/kill Shiki and then immediately complaining about how they can’t be honest about their real feelings, and the artist draws weird facial expressions all over the place. Highly recommended if you’re a fan of tsundere/crazy girl moe, otherwise you might want to stick to Airmaster. You’ll also need a better sci-fi vocabulary than me, although I think I saw some only-kind-of-bad translations.

Seriously, it’s all like this.

Saijou no Meii (The World’s Best Surgeon), Takashi Hashiguchi, 2008
When I started reading manga a few years ago there was one called Yakitate!! Japan, which was a shounen competition manga about becoming the world’s best bread baker. This is a manga by the same guy about becoming the world’s best pediatric surgeon. At this point you should be convinced – I haven’t read more than one chapter so I can’t say much else yet.

But first, erratum: I have been kindly informed that Me & The Devil Blues is being put out by Del Rey, not Viz. I’m not quite sure how I made this mistake, but it could have to do with the fact that the only other Del Rey book I have considered buying is Genshiken. Good on them!

Anyway, I’m probably the last person to notice this that would even care, but I’ve just now gotten around to looking through the C74 catalog, and I was totally thrown off when I noticed that doujin games were moved to day 2 (actually, I first noticed this when looking at astrange’s fantasy c74 pdf but whatever). After a few seconds of googling, I found this handy website which explains all the changes made to what genres go to what day. In short, instead of the old
Day 1: General
Day 2: Girls’ day
Day 3: Boys’ day + Doujin Soft/Music layout, it’s now going to be

Day 1: Girls’ day
Day 2: General (anime/games, mostly non-porn) + Doujin Soft/Music
Day 3: Boys’ day, original works

Just a warning to any of you brave souls that are thinking about doing Comiket without checking a catalog first! Now to decide if I want to tackle east or west hall on day 2 first :/